Among the Hedges

PRAISE FOR SARA MESA

“With short, propulsive chapters, Sara Mesa creates an unforgettable gothic landscape, centered on the mysterious and menacing Wybrany College, that twists in ways that unsettle and thrill. In Four by Four, Mesa’s sentences are clear as glass, but when you look through you will be terrified by what you see.”

—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel

“The atmospheric unraveling of the mystery will keep you turning the page; the ending will leave you stunned—Mesa’s Four by Four is a tautly written literary thriller that juxtaposes the innocence of children with the fetish of control; a social parable that warns against the silence of oppression and isolation through its disquieting, sparse prose.”

—Kelsey Westenberg, Seminary Co-op

“Stylistically, Four by Four’s narrative structure is both dazzling and dizzying, as its perfect pacing only enhances the metastasizing dread and dis-ease.… Mesa exposes the thin veneer of venerability to be hiding something menacing and unforgivable—and Four by Four lays it bare for all the world to see.”

—Jeremy Garber, Powell’s Books

“Very few authors evoke a visceral reaction with prose in the way that Sara Mesa does.… Four by Four sounds an alarm on the dangers of power, privilege, and the self-delusions told in order to hide complicity. A work of high gothic art, Four by Four solidifies Mesa as one of the strongest female voices in contemporary Spanish literature.”

—Cristina Rodriguez, Deep Vellum Books

“This is a linguistically precise, stylistically spare, and emotionally devastating look at the corrosive effect of abuse and power imbalance, perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson and Samanta Schweblin.”

—Shelf Awareness, starred review

“Like Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, or even Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the rich are left rotting in a swamp of their own design.… Four by Four is an uncomfortably real look into the absurd world of the bourgeoisie. It is so complex and layered that, to reach a full understanding, one may have to read it two or even three times. Not a single character, after all, is what they seem.”

—Noelle Mcmanus, The Women’s Review of Books

“A meticulously constructed and chilling study of desire and influence.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Mesa presents a painful exploration of inequity, cruelty, and the immeasurable cost of belonging.”

—Terry Hong, Booklist

“The language is short and precise, as if from a dream, yet each character has a distinctive point of view, sometimes cold and distant, sometimes uncomfortably intimate.… Four by Four is a mystery among mysteries. Things are deeply wrong at Wybrany College, but it’s not clear-cut how to fix them. Each character must fight both their innate human tendencies and the forces acting against them, and as in the real world, the solutions are personal.”

—T. Patrick Ortez, World Literature Today

“Sara Mesa. Don’t forget that name. The finalist for the 30th Premio Herralde de Novela. Read it. Share it. Talk about it. Open the book and begin. You won’t be able to put it down.”

—Uxue, Un libro al día

“An original novel full of talent, an oppressive fable in which nothing is what it seems and in which its author shows herself to have some striking credentials: it is about somebody capable of creating a sophisticated nightmare using only one stroke of fine line.”

—Pablo Martínez Zarracina, Bilbao

Among the Hedges

Sara Mesa

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY MEGAN MCDOWELL

Copyright © 2018 by Sara Mesa

Translation copyright © 2021 by Megan McDowell

First edition, 2021

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-948830-39-3 | ISBN-10: 1-948830-39-6

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America.

Cover Design by Alban Fischer

Interior Design by Anthony Blake

Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

CONTENTS

Part One: THE PARK

Part Two: THE CAFÉ

Author’s Note

AMONG THE HEDGES

Part One

THE PARK

SHE IS SO CAUGHT OFF GUARD the first time that she jumps at the sight of him. The girl is sitting with her back against a tree and reading a magazine when she hears the approaching steps, the crunch of dry leaves, and then he’s standing right there in front of her. He’s perhaps a bit taken aback, but not shocked to find her there, hidden behind the hedges. The old man apologizes—I didn’t mean to scare you! he says—and asks her what she’s reading. Between one thing and the other—between the apology and the question—the girl has time to react. This, she replies, showing him the magazine, a women’s magazine. Maybe, she thinks, when he sees this magazine that is obviously not for little girls, he’ll think she’s older than she is and she’ll avoid the dreaded question—what are you doing here, at this time of day?—though in fact the old man merely smiles and peers tentatively at the magazine. At first it seems like he’s going to take it—his fingers hesitate, reach for it—but the gesture withers out and the hand falls, spent, to his side. The old man looks at the girl now, then back at the magazine, the girl, the tree, the little hideout in the hedges, and finally speaks, saying: What’s in the magazine? What’s it about? The girl angles away from the tree trunk, leaning forward over her bare, crossed legs. The dry grass has left impressions on her skin, little red spots from all the hours of sitting on the ground. Girl stuff, she says. Stuff about music and video games, and also movies and clothes, music gossip. Gossip about singers and actors, I mean, their lives and stuff like that. I don’t know much about all that, he says, but his tone holds no creeping reproach or scorn. I read magazines, too, he says. But mine are about birds! Birds? the girl murmurs, disconcerted, wondering if maybe, when he says birds, the old man is referring to something else, that it’s actually an innuendo. This thought makes her more suspicious and she even entertains the thought of running away, but the old man is speaking again and his words sound guileless. Not just about birds, he explains, they’re really about animals in general; magazines specifically about birds aren’t so easy to find, and plus, they’re expensive! He used to subscribe to one that doesn’t exist anymore, it was delivered to his house every week, and that was where he learned everything he knows about birds, which is a lot! The old man talks like a kid—self-absorbed and excited—and the girl looks at him curiously. In the mornings, in that park—he continues—you can easily see a hoopoe and also, more and more often, a ring-necked parakeet or even a Eurasian collared dove, hasn’t she noticed? The girl shakes her head. She doesn’t even know what a normal dove looks like, she thinks, so how could she tell the difference between that and a Eurasian one?

She also thinks: what a strange man. She looks at him sidelong but doesn’t raise her head entirely—he’s still standing and she’s still sitting. She eyes him up and down, taking in his elegant laced shoes, his light-colored dress pants and matching jacket—heavy in spite of the heat—the sporty little backpack that hangs from one shoulder, so at odds with the rest of his outfit. She observes his chubby, freckled hands, his small, blond head, his little wire-rimmed glasses and mustache, his hair standing crazily on end. She finds him funny, but not enough to let her guard down. The old man keeps talking. There are exotic species that were never seen here before, he explains, species that adapted to their new environment and became a danger for the endemic ones—he gets stuck on the word endemic and has to repeat it three times before he pronounces it correctly. But he doesn’t mind them, he continues, he likes all the species, the ones from here and the ones from elsewhere, he doesn’t care where they come from, they’re all truly extraordinary! He is thoughtful for a few seconds, and that’s when his expression changes. His eyes grow round and large as if something were just dawning on him, and his jaw trembles slightly. I’m being annoying, he says, and he apologizes for the second time. No, no, says the girl out of politeness, but he insists, distressed: he always talks too much, and if no one stops him he goes on and on. Someone has to tell him, he adds disconsolately, he just doesn’t realize on his own! He looks to either side, bows his head abruptly and says goodbye to the girl, who doesn’t know what to say or do. When she sees him turn around and bumble away through the hedges, she’s relieved to be alone again. Though he didn’t seem like he’d be a problem, she thinks. He was nothing at all like the men she’s met on other occasions, the dangerous ones.

The old man reappears at more or less the same time the next day. The girl no longer finds him amusing, and it occurs to her that he could be spying on her. Nevertheless, the man’s attitude is as shy and respectful as it was the day before. He’s wearing the same clothes, the same expression of meek astonishment. This time he asks if he can sit down for a bit. He settles in as far away from her as the hideout’s size will allow: there can’t be more than six feet between the row of hedges and the tree. Legs crossed, hands on his knees, he smiles at her, takes a deep breath. You’re not reading today?, he asks, but he asks in a way that he could have asked anything else, thinks the girl, a question to break the silence. She opens her backpack and takes out a book, one she had to buy for school, and she hands it to the old man, who reaches over to take it. Do you like it?, he asks, flipping through the pages. Yeah. Depends. I get distracted. He smiles again. What, you get really bored? No, she says. And then she adds: just normal, I get bored the normal amount.

He’s never liked reading. Only his magazines about birds, he says, or about nature in general. But with novels he gets lost. Whenever he starts to read one, his head goes somewhere else, not because he gets distracted, but quite the opposite—because he gets too deep into the story! He gets attached to the protagonist, or some other character, and he imagines they’re him, or he’s them. He can’t help but change the story, imagine what he would do if he were in their place, choosing one path or another for himself. Sometimes he imagines himself as several characters at the same time, and then it’s all a big mess. By the time he realizes, he’s reading without following the story at all. He can read entire pages without understanding a thing!, while his thoughts just wander freely. Doesn’t that happen to her? The girl shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t like to read either, she admits.

Then why do you have a book in your backpack?

A blackbird slips through the bushes, sees them, and flaps away as fast as it can, making a racket. The bird distracts the old man and gives the girl time to think of a valid reply to such a silly question. Why does she have a book in her backpack? She’s not going to mention school. If she does mention it, he’ll ask what grade she’s in and then do the math. She can say that it’s her brother’s book. A book she borrowed from her brother’s room—it’s a logical answer since her brother has tons of books, and now that he’s gone she can borrow as many as she wants. She’s about to say just that, that the book belongs to her brother, when the man gets up, brushing bits of grass from his pants and stretching his limbs as if his whole body hurt. Oof, he complains, his body isn’t meant for sitting cross-legged on the ground anymore! The girl wonders just how old this old man is. This old man who, incomprehensibly, still has not asked her age.

She’s thought about changing hideouts, but she hasn’t found another as good as this. Though the tree trunk is hard and rough, it has a fairly smooth depression where she can lean against it comfortably. The branches are covered with small, soft leaves of a silky green that extend to the sides and form a kind of shelter, dappled with light and shade. The girl just has to cross through where the hedges are less thick, just sparse enough to let someone pass. Once inside, between the hedge and tree, all she has to do is sit down and no one can see her, not even someone who passes very close by—as long as they don’t peer over. She can pee right there if she ever needs to, off to one side, because it’s nearly certain no one will see her. Besides, the park is almost empty at that time of day. She arrives around eight-thirty, walking fast, head down, trying to move with confidence—the kind of confidence she’s seen in older girls, in teenagers—backpack on her back, dragging her feet, headphones on. No one ever stops her, and only occasionally does she glimpse the park and garden workers in the distance, uniformed and busy. At eleven she eats her snack, at one she gets a little drowsy—she doesn’t plan it like that: it’s just that the midday heat puts her to sleep—and at two she’s ready to get up again and head home. She crosses paths with the kids coming out of the nearest school—and with the parents or grandparents who lead them by the hand—but no one notices her: she’s a big girl next to those children, an older kid who no longer needs anyone to pick her up. It’s possible there are other hideouts in the park—all those rows of hedges must conceal some—but she hasn’t been able to find them, and it’s not a good idea to prowl around suspiciously. During the first days, in another park that was larger but also more crowded, two different men had approached her and asked lots of questions. One of them had even grabbed her arm and tried to convince her to take a walk with him. There’d also been an elderly woman who wanted to know why she was there, whether she wasn’t expected somewhere else, and whether her parents knew about her little excursion—excursion, here, struck her as an exaggerated and malicious word. The girl decided to look for another park, quieter and farther away, where no one would ask questions. She’s been in this hideout for several days now with no interruption, save for the old man, who has shown up two days in a row. But this, she thinks, the fact that he happened to be here two days in a row, doesn’t mean he’ll come every day.

But, obviously, he does.

This time, before sitting down, he takes a cloth handkerchief from his pocket, unfolds it ceremoniously and lays it on the grass. So I don’t get dirty! he says, but she looks closely and sees that he’s already dirty. The same light-colored pants as before—so poorly suited to a walk in the park—are covered in dust, their hems blackened from dragging on the ground. The old man is sweating and a lock of hair is plastered to his forehead, the lenses of his glasses are all smeared, and he has a small pair of binoculars hanging around his neck that only accentuate his outlandish appearance. Still, in spite of his scruffiness, there’s something about him that reminds her of an old neighbor of hers, a very distinguished professor, very elegant—that’s what her mother had said, that he was very distinguished and elegant; it’s something to do with the way he pushes back the lock of hair, and it’s in spite of the freckles on his hands, the redheaded paleness of his skin, so rare.